The Dilbert search index now carries 15 years worth of Dilbert comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of BFMartin (over 6 years worth of strips) and Paul Dorman (over 3 years worth of strips), myself (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors.
You can search the strips here. While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because geek.nl (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at dilbert.com/1991-02-03/ and see the strip.
Dilbert started around 20 years ago. So we’ve covered 75% of all the strips, and this is in just 8 months after starting this collaborative effort. A couple of lessons I learnt from this:
- Crowd sourcing beats going solo if you’re building content. It’s a no-brainer. There will always be only one or two people more passionate about something than you.
- The long tail is not very big. There will only be one or two people more passionate than something about you. Don’t expect the long tail contribution to be the significant. The value comes from being able to attract “the big fish”.
Thanks for the search engine.